The Zinoviev Letter by Gill Bennett — a mystery of revolution and attribution
Identifying the source of an incendiary 1924 letter from Russia makes an absorbing tale
Tony Barber October 19, 2018
On October 30 1924, the Soviet Communist party newspaper Pravda published a contemptuous attack by Leon Trotsky on Britain’s handling of the so-called Zinoviev Letter. “How a document so nonsensical, so politically meaningless, a document which cries aloud that it is a forgery, could become the focus of attention of the leading political parties of the oldest civilised country in the world, a country of centuries of world supremacy and of a parliamentary regime — that is what is truly incomprehensible,” he wrote.
After reading Gill Bennett’s authoritative study of one of Britain’s greatest 20th-century political controversies, it is hard to disagree with the leading Bolshevik revolutionary. The letter was an inflammatory document supposedly sent to the British Communist party in September 1924 by Grigory Zinoviev, head of the Comintern, the Soviet organ that promoted worldwide revolution by means of propaganda and subversion. As Bennett emphasises in her absorbing, scrupulously researched book, The Zinoviev Letter, no original of the letter has ever been found.
British intelligence agents in Riga transmitted the text of the letter — in English — to their London superiors on October 9. It was forwarded to the Foreign Office and Ramsay MacDonald, prime minister and foreign secretary in the UK’s first Labour government. Without the explicit approval of MacDonald, who had demanded indisputable proof of the letter’s authenticity, the Foreign Office delivered a formal protest to the Soviet mission in London.
Soviet officials, including Zinoviev, were taken aback by the outcry in Britain’s ruling circles. Like Trotsky, they denounced the letter as a forgery. Bennett says her archival research in Russia dug up no evidence to suggest the Bolsheviks were faking indignation and surprise. Meanwhile, Britain’s Communist party — feeble and incapable of fomenting a revolution — denied having received such a missive from Zinoviev.
Within two weeks of the letter’s arrival in London, copies had found their way to the opposition Conservative party and the Tory press, including the Daily Mail, which published the letter on October 25. Understanding the timing is crucial: MacDonald’s minority government had fallen in a parliamentary vote on October 8, and a general election was to be held on October 29. Rightwing circles were out to discredit Labour and return the Tories to power.
Labour lost the election, but few modern historians think the Zinoviev letter played a significant role in that defeat. Bennett concurs with this verdict. Labour polled over 1m more votes than in the previous election. A collapse in the Liberal vote, and Tory success in overcoming internal squabbles, were larger factors behind the 1924 result.
This leaves two questions. Assuming that the letter was a fake, who wrote it? And did those who distributed and made use of it do so for political or personal gain? As a former chief historian of the Foreign Office, whom a Labour government in 1998 commissioned to investigate the case, Bennett probably understands its murky complexities better than anyone. She was the first scholar to be permitted unrestricted access to the relevant British sources, notably the intelligence agencies’ archives. Her book is an expanded version of a well-judged report that she published in 1999.
Bennett’s conclusion is that “a likely suspect” as the letter’s author is Ivan Pokrovsky, an anti-Bolshevik, former tsarist officer. He had connections to a forgery syndicate in Berlin and was probably in contact with British spies in Riga. In 1929 Pokrovsky was named as the author by the Daily Herald, whose editor had ties to Soviet intelligence. Likewise the author Nigel West (aka Rupert Allason, a former Tory MP) and Oleg Tsarev, a retired KGB colonel, identified Pokrovsky as the letter’s author in their 1998 book, The Crown Jewels.
Bennett is satisfied that there was no organised anti-Labour conspiracy inside Britain’s organs of government. Still, she writes, “there were a hundred ways in which the letter could have reached the press, Conservative Central Office or other interested parties. Military officers, current and former intelligence chiefs and officers, civil servants, politicians and newspaper proprietors of a Conservative persuasion — that is, nearly all of them — had motive and opportunity to get hold of the letter and make sure it was publicised.”
In Bennett’s view, two key suspects are Desmond Morton, co-ordinatorof UK overseas intelligence, and Joseph Ball, head of domestic counter-espionage. Ball joined Conservative Central Office in 1927 and later strenuously tried to “control the narrative of the Zinoviev Letter”. Another mysterious figure is Rafael Farina, the overseas intelligence head of station in Riga, who may have known that the letter was a forgery but sent it to London anyway.
As Bennett says, the full truth may never be known. But the letter still resonates in British politics — less because of who wrote it than because, for the left, it embodies ever-present suspicions of an anti-Labour establishment and media conspiracy.
The Zinoviev Letter: The Conspiracy that Never Dies, by Gill Bennett, RRPOUP, RRP£25/$34.95, 340 pages
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2019. All rights reserved.